Idols

It has become rather irrelevant to debate whether there can be smart writing about television, and even, increasingly, about TV’s naughty younger sibling, reality TV. Weekly recaps of “American Idol,” “The Hills,” and “Dancing With the Stars” have come to rival post-game sports wraps in both their ubiquity and addictive inanity. We might complain that such stuff is shallow, but the writing is usually engaging, diverting, and intentionally disposable. It’s what the Web does quite well.

[#image: /photos/59095380c14b3c606c104164]But what about durable writing about reality television, is such a thing possible? As in, would you read an entire book about it? “Reality Matters,” edited by Anna David and out this week, may answer that question. It contains considered essays on “Project Runway,” “Dog Whisperer,” “Survivor,” and “Jersey Shore.” Of note is the foreword, by James Frey, in which he shares his initial resistance to reality shows—”I had enough bullshit in my life…. Why would I care about someone else’s”—and then his eventual conversion:

I saw people doing shit that I could identify with, except that it seemed cooler, more exciting, more dramatic, more difficult, more rewarding, more perilous, more of everything, and, most important, more real. I was fucking hooked.

Frey, it seems, had found a perfect representation of his general maximalism: Bigger, louder, realer! While his presence in the collection is a kind of stunt—reality and James Frey, get it?—he nonetheless has provided useful analysis of the fakery/reality issues inherent in television that purports to be, though rarely is, entirely true.

The collection is dedicated to “reality show fans—and its harshest critics.” Though I’m neither a fan nor a critic, Richard Rushfield’s reflection on his years as an “American Idol” critic for the Los Angeles Times caught my eye, because this season I have at least become a viewer. I’ve come late to the game (Rushfield has a great passage on how everyone he met claimed to be “the only person” who had never seen the show), and apparently to a game much diminished (the current season, I’ve been told, is a flop). Still, I’ve enjoyed the episodes, perhaps especially because I find Simon Cowell fascinating. I’m not sure that I buy Rushfield’s argument that the show is “far more dramatic than any other competition, any other piece of mass entertainment or amusement in our culture, in human history.” Gladiators (Roman, not American) were fighting for their lives, after all. But when he scales back, he identifies the show’s compelling core: a group of earnest, honestly desperate young people, “spending a minute and a half on a very large empty stage trying to convince the world that their lives should be about something bigger.” It may be unseemly to so publicly plead for fame—contestants sometimes link their hands in prayer, and mouth words like “please” into the camera—but it’s real.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.